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Literary Review
FICTION
Can’t stop grinning
MITA GHOSE
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e is an unapologetically lowbrow satire on the world of advertising.
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e, Matt Beaumont, Harper, p.342, £7.
With a title and format that are likely to raise eyebrows and reader response that appears equivocal at best, e may well be flipped through casually before being tossed right back into the pile at some bookstore. If laughter were i
ndeed the best medicine, that would be a crying shame, because I, for one, haven’t stopped grinning since I turned the last page of British novelist Matt Beaumont’s unapologetically lowbrow satire on the world of advertising.
In fact, during its first run in 2000, e created quite a stir, with readers eager to play sleuth and match its protagonists with actual persons from London’s advertising circles. Eight years on, however, the consensus on this epistolary novel in a contemporary mould is surprisingly ambivalent, with critics describing it as “quirky and stylish and funny” and “cotton candy for the brain” in the same breath. Sure, e is light and airy, offers instant gratification and is over before you know it. And since punch lines resist being recycled, a second round isn’t recommended. But isn’t that how it is with most bestsellers that stake no claim to literary immortality?
Uncannily reminiscent of Tom Sharpe’s novels, e is irreverent to the hilt and funnier than anything I’ve read in a while. Its Y2K allusions (forgivable, if you recall its year of publication) apart, the novel is bang on target, from the gimmicky title — an apt encapsulation of the e-mailed exchanges it consists of — to the mercilessly astute insights it offers on venal corporate practices, office shenanigans and an entire spectrum of largely over-the-top human behaviour that manifests itself within Miller Shanks, a London advertising agency in feverish pursuit of the Holy Grail: the multi-billion-dollar Coca-Cola account that will apparently serve as a springboard for the firm’s ascent to vertiginous heights.
While Beaumont’s humour often descends from the unctuously sardonic to the scatological and his linear plot rides on the back of one outrageous development after another (including a model’s silicone-implant malfunction on a flight to a location shoot), his forte is, undoubtedly, his characterisation. As a former copywriter, his perceptions about the denizens of the world he has known so intimately are spot on. But the truths he exposes are just as relevant for any other corporate set-up. Just consider the dramatis personae (for, e is more play than novel, relying as it does on written communications or “dialogue”, as it were, to take the story forward): a Stalinesque Chief Executive Officer who makes mincemeat of his subordinates, but will grovel to save his own neck, a pompous and largely ineffectual Head of Client Services, whose raison d’être seems to lie in pulling rank at every opportunity, a Creative Director with a penchant for transsexuals and substance abuse who has perfected intellectual-property theft to a fine art, an assortment of sex-starved creative assistants who are up to no good, secretaries who backstab and upstage each other via e-mails...
A shrewd move on Beaumont’s part is to extend the grapevine and engage the Miller Shanks staff in gossip (through e-mails, naturally) with their friends and ex-colleagues from previous organisations. It gives him the licence to expand his canvas, follow up on events and flesh out his characters within the limitations of his chosen genre — the comic novel. A masterstroke is the network glitch he introduces to drag into the picture the firm’s English-language-challenged Finnish CEO in Helsinki who accidentally “eavesdrops” on e-mails containing disparaging remarks about him from his U.K. counterpart and genially misinterprets them as heartfelt compliments.
Surprisingly real
That the author succeeds in making every one of these near-stereotypical characters so believable as to resemble actual individuals from our own workplace is part of his achievement. As in real life, his gallery of “rogues” — some loveable, others not — features neither heroes nor villains. His protagonists move in and out of a grey area where good and evil meet, conspire, triumph or get their comeuppance. But ultimately, the author never loses sight of his objective. Bending his craft to the dictates of his selected genre, Beaumont ensures that poetic justice prevails in the end, establishing without a doubt that what goes around comes around and no one — be it humble hireling or CEO — is safe from the fallout when Judgement Day arrives and the agency threatens to implode.
With the “all’s well that ends well” denouement firmly in place, e is like a treat, as feel-good as its author intended it to be. Cotton candy, anyone? If the answer is no, you don’t know what you’re missing.
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